You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Loneliness’ category.
Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outgrown
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love
Leonard Cohen
+ + +
The poet/songwriter/singer Leonard Cohen gave us truth in verses that spoke of this world and what surpasses its seeming boundaries. He wrote and sang of Love in its presence and its absence, in its triumph and its defeat, in its joy and its pain.
We live, as we always have, in search of this tent of shelter. No less now than yesterday.
Think of the old man who moves slowly alone to his last moments. His being is of memory, longing and certain passage. To the end he wakes and walks alone.
Think too of the children “asking to be born” in a time when choice trumps caring and hearts have been misplaced.
If Cohen’s words do not touch one deeply than a hollow being lives next door, down the street and in the structures where hope is placed but seldom known.
Dance be to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Shalom.
Postscript – I discovered Leonard Cohen when I was a young teen. Met his niece in my graduate education at John Hopkins. Not too many of my peers were familiar with him.
If you have not enjoyed his writing and his songs, I encourage you to become familiar with him especially at this time of public hostility and the harshness we encounter daily.
When darken clouds gather and no soul the meal sufficient fills – the sane among us seek the tent of shelter that is the homeward dove.
God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
Gen 1:26
+ + +
Why did God make us in His image? So we would have the ability to maintain a close personal relationship with Him.
This, Dear Friends, is fundamental to our understanding of ourself and our worth.
Knowing that we are made for relationship with God – we cannot be lonely, or feel insignifcant. But alas, if we forfeit our belief in God and God’s desire for relationship with us – loneliness sets in and multiplies … particularly when we set about to define ourself as being important and set out to establish that which we already can know – that is: that we are important and never without God – hence never alone, never forsaken, nor abandoned.
Think just about this one verse from Scripture. Then watch the daily news and see how many people act out of loneliness – how many seek intimacy in ways that insure their loneliness. Imagine the pain the follows when one relaizes he or she sought intimacy in the most unwise ways while having possessed this right from their creation and birth!!!
Shalom.
God created man in His own image …
Gen 1:27
+ + +
Why would God create us in His image? A fair question – with an easy answer. The answer? So He might have a relationship with us and us with God. And wherein is the epitome of intimacy and love everlasting. Yes, the very thing we all long for in our mortal life is given to us right from the beginning of life and time.
God’s love of us is central to our well-being, contentment, happiness, strength, meaning, purpose, peace and identity – the one cardinal Truth that banishes all failure, hardship, setbacks, sufferings. Yet, we so often ignore this fundamental reality. But, why?
Pride is the most common reason. Pride would have us try to make life work to our design. Despite our failures and the loneliness and stress that our pride produces – we persist … until one day we resign ourselves to this fact – we cannot succeed or be at peace when we neglect God and the truth of God’s omnipotence and God’s love of each one of us.
Still others neglect God for they fear God is a wrathful, unforgiving God – while God is a merciful God. Yes, people by into fear and the false identity that is pervaded by others that God is not a loving God.
Remember Jeremiah 29:11 – “I know the plans that I have for you, plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and hope.” (Emphasis added.)
Why would anyone wish to neglect God in favor of making life more difficult and less certain and stable? Think about that today and tomorrow … until you come to your senses.
Shalom.
Remember Pearl Harbor, 1941/Remember Benghazi Too
It is cold and the sky is clear, the colors true and the mountains firm and sure. December and the Son is near. Despite the public nonsense, it is Christmas time … and Holy Silence is here.
# # #
Man … a wanderer and wayfarer … in search of a … holy place, a center and source of indefectible life …
the Irish monks “… simply floated off to sea, abandoning themselves to wind and current, in the hope of being led to the place of solitude which God himself would pick for them …”
Walker Percy, in “From Pilgrimage to Crusade”
+ + +
Have you seen your life as a pilgrimage? Have you imagined it so? Have you been given to live what God has given? Are you so blessed by the grace of that gift to come to that place He chose for you?
Live properly and fully lived, life is a pilgrimage. And I have come to realize this as I come to my 73rd year this month.
Yes, I have been overcome by the length of time and its passing speed, but more so the unusual continuity and scope of my life … from betrayal and poverty, to death and homelessness, to conversion and many who loved me to that place … In it all I see my gifts of interest in others, and the will to survive life’s constant and bitter combat and the desire for God in all of it.
Lately I have sought peace and quiet after years of battles – defense of others with my lawyer’s trade and growing faith – seeking truth and a just result … standing alone as loneliness prepared me so.
Seeing life as a pilgrim’s journey is a blessing that overwhelms, producing tears of wonder for the divine gift of consistency that was in me and this life so on track to be just what I had been made to be.
Imagine the innate mystery of consistency and the companionship of the right values and the best goals of service to others … a life like the Irish Monks submission to the winds and currents of a life Godly given. Imagine too the sight of God in those who loved me to this place. My shepherds … my shepherds – so many, so many … angels given, angles given …
Looking back now I see one astonishing grace – that I was given to accept life as it presented and to do so without complaint or bitter feeling – but rather to accept it as what it was – the gift of challenges that built with each hard event courage, wisdom and greater strength, greater depth, greater faith, greater insight and the reward of solitude, certainty of the soul and peace which conquers all conflict. Once lonely, I could stand alone because of Him … I am who Am.
A pilgrimage – previously unbeknownst to me. But for the grace to walk one step at a time over hills and through dark valleys for all these years I would not know how grace delivered consistency to me … and now I see that God has done as God intended … and my unwitting collaboration with His Desire for me … grace … grace … grace – the mystery of grace.
Looking back I see through tears of awe and humility for I have done by the Grace of God what God has asked of me – simply to journey as a pilgrim would.
I pray you know the same.
Do not get bogged down in the daily voices of nonsense – they hold no sway, no mystery they.
Shalom.
… there’s nothing more intimate in life than simply being understood. And understanding someone else.
Brad Meltzer, The Inner Circle
+ + +
When you hear the word “intimacy” in our present culture you almost always think of it in a physical context – and hardly ever as Brad Meltzer refers to it.
This tells you something significant about our culture.
It tells you that in a material culture we are far more physical than interpersonal, cordial, communal, familial, or spiritual.
Just look at the drivel that emanates from the “entertainment” industry. One denizen of that environ recently offered naked pictures of herself (ugh!) to “get out the vote” for Democrats. Go figure?
Yes, we have destroyed, or badly injured, the idea of “intimacy” (and of sexuality) by our ignorance as to what intimacy is and what an absolutely critical, indispensable role it plays in human well-being, friendship, and cordial and communal relationships with others.
Frankly, there is no friendship without the intimacy Mr. Meltzer identifies it. The health of a human being is dependent on intimacy.
We are social beings – meant to be known and to know others. We are recipients of life and hence recipients by nature for life – bound to be received and to receive others.
Likewise we are a story people. We live by narrative, learn by narrative, record narrative, gain wisdom and insight by narrative, worship through narrative.
Telling and receiving another’s story is sacred, and the bedrock of our psychological welfare and the psychological well-being of another. That is the field of real intimacy.
Yes, we are contented and feel whole when another person hears our story and accepts it, receives it, carries it in their own unfolding life.
Today we are far from the intimacy Brad Meltzer identifies.
Our well-being and survival depends on moving toward the intimacy Mr. Meltzer identifies. Short of that objective and disorder and discontent grows and grows, and brings with it homicides, suicides, adulteries, loneliness, corruptions, betrayals, hostilities, divisions, broken families and failed marriages, sexual predators, psychological illnesses, angers, addictions and depressions.
Get “intimacy” right or suffer the grave consequences. We are made for one another – far more than merely what is material and physical.
Shalom.
“… My soul has become troubled; and what shall I say, ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ But it is for this purpose I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”
Jn 12: 27, 28
+ + +
Jesus knew that His hour was near. He knew the trial he would endure. So do we.
We know that trials will come to us – that we will be neglected at times, maybe forgotten. We will know loneliness and rejection – and being taken for granted. This is just the way life unfolds at times.
We know as well that injury awaits, and pain and suffering also. And we know that mortal life will end in time – maybe soon, maybe latter – but end it will.
But if we are with Christ we cannot be troubled. Oh yes, being left by others works against the grain of our intimate needs and preferences – but those who are in relationship with Christ are intended to live for the glory of the Father not for the attention of others.
Yes, if Christians – we live as Christ. For us, there is no other goal in life but to live for the Glory of the Father. Doing so, one can feel pain, rejection, loss and rise above it.
This is our call and our eternal estate. Fear not. Find infinite peace in troubles and trials – such deeds (when man made) show the failures of others, their lack of belief. There is no sting for you in their failure – but there is for them.
Shalom.
In order to be enchanted we must be, above all, capable of seeing another person – simply opening one’s eyes will not do. (Emphasis added.)
Jose Ortega y Gasset, in On Love, Aspects of a Simple Theme
+ + +
In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor tells us that those in secular culture have lost their capacity for enchantment.
To be enchanted is to be charmed, enraptured – capable of being taken by delight. The word itself is rooted in the Latin word incantare meaning: to chant magic words.
What Taylor is saying is that in a secular existence one cannot easily be enraptured, taken by the mysticism of sacred things, lost in sacred words. In terms of Ortega y Gasset – Taylor is saying that one is unable to know a love of another completely.
Mind you Ortega y Gasset reminds us that to take another in one must do so not with eyes but with heart.
Considered fully, Taylor makes a very serious observation; in secular culture we are unable to be fully human, to know the love of another as fully as we once could. Taylor is saying in secular existence we lessen or lose the capacity for intimacy, for relationship with others – lose the capacity for deep intimate union with others. In this we are less human, less fully developed, less able to experience the mystical experience of faith or the wholeness of our being.
Taylor’s view seems right to me.
I listen to the contemporary music of the 1940’s and 50’s and I hear ballads that express the love one can have for another. The content of the music of those days was overflowing with descriptions of the rapture of love of another.
I hear very little today that conveys such sentiments. No now, I mostly hear coarse lyrics, and I see marital infidelity, divorce, abortion, the rise of pornography, harsh language on the public airwaves and little that models healthy devotions of man to woman, and woman to man. It is my view that feminism has actually deprived woman of their humanity and men and women are much the worse for this.
Secularism levies a heavy price. No wonder we manifest such unhappiness and loneliness. Maybe it is time to reject secularism in all its crippling forms.
Shalom.
Absolutely shameful. Congressman Devin Nunes, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, indicated today that there was no intelligence material alleging any collusion between Russia and candidate Donald Trump that would have justified the opening of an F.B.I. investigation of Candidate Trump. He made this comment after reviewing the existing intelligence reports that would have contained such information should it have existed.
Mr. Nunes also said that two former associates of Candidate Hillary Clinton (the former Secretary of State in the Obama administration) were disseminating information to people in the State Department – leaving Nunes and others to wonder if Hillary might have been the impetus for investigating her opponent Donald Trump.
This is all absolutely shameful and fitting a totalitarian regime. Very serious stuff.
Spirlaw 